Canon William Arlow: Canon William Arlow, who has died aged 79, was once one of the most recognisable clerics in the North. The remarkable meeting he arranged between leading Protestant churchmen and the IRA in Feakle, Co Clare, helped produce a substantial ceasefire in 1975.
It was also Arlow who drew from the then leader of the IRA, Dáithí Ó Conaill, the amused reassurance that the Rev Ian Paisley would never be a republican target since Paisley's rhetoric made him the best recruiting agent the IRA could have.
But at a time when republican violence was at its height, the unguarded and naive Arlow brought continuing trouble on his family and storms of disapproval on his own head by artlessly describing IRA leaders as intelligent and committed.
He also said he had reason to believe the British government, at the time of the Feakle meeting, had given the IRA a commitment it would withdraw. This has always been denied by British officials.
Arlow took harsh criticism from his own community for treating with the enemy. Paisley called the group "the Fickle Feakle clergy", Arlow a "Provo parrot". He received many death threats, obscene letters and anonymous late-night phone calls, had to move house and was under police guard for some time.
Brought up in Banbridge, Co Down, he was ordained in the Church of Ireland in 1958. He first served as curate in the shipyard workers' district of Ballymacarrett, east Belfast. Later he was minister in St Patrick's, Newry, a largely Catholic town. He believed this mixed pastoral experience, plus having a Catholic grandmother and Protestant grandfather, helped him to appreciate both views.
In a long reminiscence in 2004, Arlow told the Clare Champion that in the early 1970s he had appealed in vain to UDA leader Andy Tyrie to stop Catholic families being driven out of the city's Protestant east. In time he and Tyrie developed a mutual trust and Arlow arranged contacts between loyalists and republicans to try to stop sectarian killings.
He left active ministry early in 1974 after he was warned that he would lose his voice permanently if he did not stop talking. He was supposed to be convalescing when the Irish Council of Churches recruited him to build bridges across the religious divide. The resulting non-stop conversation left lasting damage. Loyalist paramilitaries nicknamed Arlow "Whispering Grass" after the popular song of the time.
When he asked the IRA to meet Protestant churchmen in autumn 1974, they were abominated following bombings in England and as the North suffered relentless violence. Over these first years of the Troubles, the IRA was responsible for almost 600 deaths, half of the total. Even diehard republican support had faltered, almost 150 IRA members had been killed, hundreds were in jail.
Moderate nationalists were near despair after the loyalist strike and collapse of the pioneering power-sharing executive, during which loyalists bombed Dublin and Monaghan, killing 33 people. After the IRA bombings in Birmingham, Guildford and Woolwich, unionists increasingly feared that Britain might withdraw from Northern Ireland to prevent further attacks.
Rather than trying to revive politics after the loyalist strike, then northern secretary Merlyn Rees - much blamed for failing to defend the executive - began overtures towards paramilitaries, including the IRA. Arlow was approached on the plane home after a conference in Amsterdam with loyalist and republican paramilitaries, apparently by a participant with republican connections.
After months of preliminary contacts with republicans, Arlow and seven others travelled to the remote village of Feakle on December 9th. It was a month after the Birmingham bombing, which had killed 21 and injured almost 200.
Arlow said later they wanted to know who the IRA was and whom it represented, and to convince it that British movement of any kind, and unification of Ireland, became steadily less likely the more they "shot and bombed" Protestants. They thought any IRA they met would be "mindless monsters" and expected in any case to be fobbed off with low-ranking members. They arrived to be reassured by Ruairí Ó Brádaigh, then a group turned up flanked by men with "guns in their pockets who took up positions guarding them": the entire army council, they were told, with one exception.
The republicans were Ó Brádaigh, Dáithí Ó Conaill, Séamus Twomey, Kevin Mallon, Billy McKee, JB O'Hagan, Séamus Loughran and Máire Drumm. Ó Conaill, thought to be then IRA chief-of-staff, Twomey, O'Hagan and Mallon were all on the wanted list, the last three having escaped by helicopter from Mountjoy jail.
Ó Brádaigh told Arlow "the man you need to convince" was Twomey, sitting at the bar wearing dark glasses.
Twomey talked about returning to Belfast having been on the run to discover young people "running wild", drinking and taking drugs. He wondered why the police did nothing before remembering "that he had helped push them out".
Arlow "began to see" that these were men "concerned about their children and their church". The church group remarked on the intelligence and conviction of the republicans. "Ó Brádaigh was brilliant and Ó Conaill was even better. They weren't stupid Irishmen from the bogs - these were intelligent men who were fighting for a just cause from their point of view. For the first time we began to wonder 'have they got a just cause?' "
The meeting became public when the three fugitives fled after a phone call. A large raiding force of Garda Special Branch arrived, backed up by soldiers. They found the churchmen instead of Twomey et al.
The church group had suggested the IRA should declare a permanent ceasefire if the British gave five undertakings, the first being a denial of any "political or territorial interests in Ireland beyond its obligations to Northern Ireland citizens". A few days after Feakle the IRA said this was meaningless without renunciation of any claim to sovereignty, but agreed there should be a "bilateral truce". Provided there was a declaration of "intent to withdraw", soldiers should stay until there was a settlement.
Contacts continued, resulting in a Christmas ceasefire which was first extended and then in February declared indefinite. In return Rees began to release those detained without trial, scaled down army operations and opened more than a dozen "incident centres" equipped with phones and fax machines, from which republicans were to "monitor" the truce and contact British officials with concerns. The SDLP and the Irish Government objected, almost as strongly as unionists, to a development which laid the foundations for Sinn Féin's later organisation.
As the "truce" was repeatedly broken and IRA members were caught up in overtly sectarian killings and internecine feuding, Ó Brádaigh and Ó Conaill were badly damaged. Young Northern IRA figures led by Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness called them gullible and "disgraceful". They decided that a prolonged ceasefire and contact with the British had brought republicanism to the brink of defeat, ousted the southern leaders and began to plan the development of Sinn Féin.
In 1979 Arlow was named canon in charge of ecumenical reconciliation affairs in St Anne's cathedral, Belfast, sometimes nicknamed the "Canon of Peace", and in 1986, Bishop's Curate, Ballyphilip and Ardquin.
In August 1996, in a brief return to prominence, Arlow criticised Archbishop Robin Eames' leadership for identifying the church with the Orange Order by failing to clearly oppose the protest at the Church of Ireland at Drumcree.
WJ (William) Arlow: born 1927; died July 27th, 2006